Working on site all day gives you no chance to compile a minute-by-minute beautifully crafted blog post.

Thankfully, we have Twitter!

My life on Twitter began at around the same time my archaeological career did. I had promised myself that I would set up an account once I had handed in my BA dissertation and, co-incidentally, my first job in fieldwork started on the very day of that deadline. Usually I tweet every so often about what’s happening on site – if we get any good finds, if something unusual turns up, if I’m working on a particularly interesting/beautiful feature, or if when we shovelbums develop fever-like symptoms (‘trench’ and ‘cabin’ varieties, depending on the weather) – but today, of course, was an exception. My aim was to document everything I was doing. Yes, even my breakfast!

The palaeochannel is FULL of Early Mesolithic flint. The main features in this area – predominantly ditches – were excavated and recorded a few weeks ago. It is thought that we may have a hand-axe production site, as several were found when the area was first opened by machine. Now we are using test pits into the palaeochannel to sample this material and see if we need to develop and implement a different excavation strategy for the whole area.

A ring ditch in Area 5 turned out to be two-in-one! There were 8 slots dug through it. That’s a lot of section drawings and context record sheets to amend… And that’s before you even get started on the matrix for the area…

5.30pm

Safely home after a few detours! Usually it'd be straight to the pub now, but I need to pack for going on holiday tomorrow… #dayofarch

I’d say today wasn’t entirely an average day in the field for this site, and for commercial archaeology in general. An average day in Kent would be whacking the fill out of a ditch/half-sectioning a whole load of postholes and recording it all (filling in forms, doing scale drawings of the feature, and photographing it). The fiddly nature of our excavation strategy for these test pits means your speed is limited – something which is usually a problem for a project that is developer-funded as there is always a schedule and a budget to stick to. But this Early Mesolithic stuff deserves the time we’re spending on it, and it just means my ‘Day of Archaeology’ submission describes one of those rare days when you never really put your trowel down!

Since starting at Oxford Archaeology almost four years back I (Joseph) have taken on a role different, perhaps, than that of many archaeologists. I work for an IS department now and seem to be concentrating upon communication tools, technologies and systems. I’m quite happy with this; as far as I’m concerned Archaeology is the communication of ideas and as such the discipline would be nothing without dissemination.

What does this have to do with this Day of Archaeology?

Well, I do seem to spend more time dealing with archaeologists rather than archaeology, which is an interesting distinction at times. Having said that, many of the communication technologies I work with aren’t the exclusive preserve of Archaeologists. Whilst I have installed a broadband connection to a field in France (and these layer 1-4 activities may form another post later), I thought this post should concentrate on our activities on the Oxford Archaeology Twitter account. Why do we have an account and what do we do with it? I’m not sure I know the answers to those questions, but they might be interesting to think openly about. If nothing else, I can describe what we’re doing with it today.

According to our internal forum, I registered @oatweet on July 1st 2010. At the time we’d been asked to brainstorm some concepts for new websites – one for archaeological dissemination [1] and another for commercial clients – and I signed up for the Twitter account thinking we’d use it for something. “Something” was about as far as I was thinking; I supposed it would be good for quick updates that could be syndicated easily, or simply for raising awareness of the fact that we exist and are doing a great deal of interesting work. The websites aren’t here yet, but we’re getting into Twitter. For a long time, the Twitter feed simply sucked new entries from our Library site and posted them up as links. We’re currently undertaking a program of scanning our entire collection of reports and placing them on the Library site; @oatweet let people know how we were getting on.

I was doing the occasional human person tweet, but nothing very exciting; this isn’t the way to drum up followers. This was noticed by Hannah, who asked for the password so that she could get involved. Now would be the time to point out that we don’t have a Social Media policy here at work – I don’t think it’s necessary as we have a rough media policy and I believe that different media shouldn’t require different policies – and we’re not really officially endorsed by- or approved of- Oxford Archaeology. I secretly expect the day that we get shut down from upstairs. Drumming up followers is a policy that’s working, however, and between us we’re posting more frequently and trying to engage more with our followers.

There are probably ways of measuring your Twitter ROI; traffic sent to your website is something I’m sure plenty of people look into and I’m sure others will rate event attendance or book sales against the Twitter coverage they received. Frankly there’s not enough hours in the day and we don’t do any of that. If there was a Twitter metric usage we pay slight attention to, it’s our number of followers. The thinking is simple; the more followers we have, the more attention we’re bringing to the work of Oxford Archaeology. Twitter’s quick and off the cuff style of dissemination is reflected in our treatment of the media.

Still, I’ve not got on to today’s actions: Today, to celebrate #dayofarch and to try and highlight that we release books that are (if I can say this publicly) pretty-ruddy-good, we’re giving away the entire Thames Through Time series to one lucky retweeter. As far as archaeological work goes, this is quite a simple process; we write down the names of people that retweet us, they go in a hat and one gets pulled out. I’ve got a Masters degree and that’s the most archaeological I’m getting today; students take note. On Monday I’ll be putting three massive hardback books in envelopes and trying to trick someone else into paying the postage for them. Ignore that for now though, as the winner is…

Congratulations to you and big thanks to everyone that entered the competition. As mentioned above, you’ve helped highlight the fact that we write books and exist on Twitter. For this we are extremely grateful.

[1] Some might call this a Public Archaeology site, but I’m not a big fan of the phrase. I’m a member of the public, after all, so is everyone else that works at Oxford Archaeology. More so, I’ve never seen any archaeology undertaken by anyone who wasn’t also a member of the public.

The Skills for the Future trainees contributed to Day of Archaeology early as they were presenting a showcase of their work at an event at Edinburgh Castle on the 21st July and some will not be around on Day of Arch as they are taking a well earned holiday! Here the trainees explain what they’ve been working on over the past 6 months and their future plans.

Dave Avery and Nora Noonan
‘Goings On in General Collections’
The last four months have seen us working with a wide range of archaeological and architectural material, the focus being on hierarchical cataloguing and best practice when re-housing archival material to ensure long lasting preservation. We’ve witnessed a major migration of RCAHMS records into a new database and have acted as guinea pigs in testing this new database, working closely with Collections staff to feedback our experiences. We’ve spent time in the National Collection of Aerial Photography digitising and centre-pointing as well as producing Feature pages for their website. We have really enjoyed working and learning from people from all over the organisation, the programme of work has been extremely varied and there is still half a year to go.

Craig Turner and Kate Cochlan
‘Mosaics, Documentaries and Field Trips’
We’ve been based for the most part in the NCAP department. We’ve undertaken a range of tasks via which we have slowly but surely familiarised ourselves with the photographic material in its varied forms – film, print and digital. We were lucky enough to be involved with the work preceding the Operation Crossbow documentary, broadcast on BBC Two in May, helping to digitise, centre-point and prepare the relevant imagery. Other activities have included learning about the surrogate copying process while working with All Scotland Survey material; receiving preservation and conservation training; learning about colour balancing and RAW image processing; going on field trips with the Survey and Recording department and spending time with the Collections department. We particularly enjoyed developing the Glasgow news item on the NCAP website – preparing snapshots of two geo-rectified aerial mosaics and writing accompanying feature articles. We’re both exited about the next stage of our training – working collaboratively to deliver a prototype package for a fresh and exciting new look for the NCAP website.

Bryony Jackson, Elaine Johnston and Tania Dron
‘French Verbs to Facial Hair’
We began our Education and Outreach work programme by developing resources for Scran – Features, Pathfinder Packs, and PDF supporting materials on themes relative to the Curriculum for Excellence. We were able to select out own languages, citizenships, battles, royalty, nuclear power, comedians, cannibalism and facial hair! We really enjoyed Scran’s variety and the opportunity to expand on our experiences of developing web content. Stepping from online resources to on-site activities, our three month placements with Historic Scotland and the National Trust for Scotland started in April. This gave us the chance to develop the educational aspects of locations ranging across Scotland’s castles, museums and country houses.

Showcase Event

Some more photographs of the event itself in the Devil’s Elbow at Edinburgh Castle.

The Skills for the Future trainees can be followed on their

own blog at http://skills.rcahms.gov.uk and Twitter page and by following the #SftF hashtag.